education

For the past two years, I have served as the Assistant Superintendent of the Innovation Network, while also continuing to serve as co-principal of Science Leadership Academy. It was an incredibly exciting and powerful learning experience, and I count myself lucky to work with such a talented group of educators – both the people in the schools I served as Assistant Superintendent, and the members of Dr. Hite’s senior leadership team.

It is an amazing thing to be able to help other school founders and school leaders work on their visions for their schools. We accomplished a great deal – including opening SLA Middle School and Vaux – a Big Picture School (which will open in September), bringing New Tech Network to Philadelphia, and creating a model for innovation within a large urban district like Philadelphia.

Yet what also became clear to me is just how much passion I still have for the model we created at Science Leadership Academy. I have been incredibly lucky to have been able to work within the School District of Philadelphia and build a three school network with people I love and care deeply about. And I especially love working in a context where I can know and work with kids every day. Over the last few months, Dr. Hite and I have talked about the passion I have for that work.

And so, it is with great excitement that I am now returning to that work full-time as CEO of SLA Schools. Dr. Hite has developed this position so that I can continue to support and grow the SLA model in Philadelphia. I am tremendously excited to have the opportunity to do so.

Thanks so much for the support and patience I’ve had from so many communities over the last two years, especially my co-principal Aaron Gerwer. I’ll also be cheering on the Philadelphia Virtual School, Workshop School, Building 21, the LINC, the U School, and the new Vaux – Big Picture High School and look forward to continuing our friendships and (less formally) our learning community as we all tackle new ways of serving Philadelphia’s children.

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I know this post is not exactly espousing a radical notion, but it’s still worth putting words to the page.

Theo loves to draw. He’s got an amazing imagination that translates to the page in ways that astound his mom and me. And our house is rapidly becoming the Theo Gallery.

And we live four blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As a dad, I’m incredibly fortunate to have the financial means to afford a family members to the museum so I can expose Theo to the world of art inside the museum’s walls.

But not every family can afford membership to their local art museum, and even fewer families live within walking distance of a world-class museum. But every child can be exposed to the world of art – both creating and appreciating it – through school. And every child should be.

And yet, with all of the cuts to education and all of the time and energy expended on preparing for high-stakes tests, art education has been cut in many districts and many schools – and disproportionately in our neediest schools where parents may not have the money to afford a family membership. That’s criminal.

I was raised in a house with tons of artwork because of my mom’s love of art. My mom first fell in love with Leger on a school trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art when she was in 6th grade. She grew up in Camden, NJ which wasn’t a well-funded district even then, but they had art education. No one ever took her out of art class to make sure she could pass some test. Presumably, no one ever told her teachers that field trips to a Philadelphia museum took the student away from “time on task.”

I want every child to have the opportunity to have a rich art education. As Gary Stager has said often, “We are the richest country in the world, our schools should be able to afford a cello and a computer.” I want kids to go to museums, I want them to sculpt and draw. I want them to listen to jazz and classical and play instruments and sing. Here in Philadelphia, private organizations are trying to fill the gap. The Philly Stamp Pass program does an excellent job of giving kids access to museums and Stanford Thompson and the folks at Play On, Philly are doing amazing work with music education in Philadelphia.

But we should never have to rely on private philanthropy to fund what should be publicly funded in our schools.

The exhibit Theo and I went to today was entitled “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis” — it is just wrong that so few students in our metropolis were able to see it… or even had a class where they could have learned about it.

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Most classrooms have bulletin boards. It’s where teachers put up exemplary work – often ten or twenty versions of the same project. And many teachers hang up projects in the hallways. We do that too, but does it go far enough? What if students and teachers treated their school as a living gallery and made more deliberate attempts to curate the school?

We didn’t set out to do that at SLA, but it’s happened. Over the past few years, students had ideas about creating murals or taking over pieces of the school to display their work. Teachers have taken entire walls to do permanent installations, and we’ve even taken over the walls of the city outside our school for art installations.

Living Art project created by the students of Josh Block and Melanie Manuel

The result is that our school is slowly transforming, wall by wall, to be a showcase of the work and planning and thoughtfulness of the people of SLA. It happened because of an overwhelming desire to say yes to good ideas, rather than a deliberate attempt to say, “Every teacher must take over a 20×20 space outside their classroom,” which probably would have led to disaster.

Instead, we now have a dedicated space for a rotating gallery of student art work. We have an original mosaic of a Philadelphia cityscape hanging on the third floor. The space outside the 5th floor math lab is now filled with equations and formulas. Our hallways have original bio-wall-structures throughout them. Every year, masks from our Spanish 4 class take over the back wall of the second floor. Walls are being repurposed as canvasses. Ceiling tiles are being redesigned. It’s exciting. The school – always a colorful place – is now really becoming our own.

Created by Chelsea A. Smith as part of her capstone

And now that it has happened organically, we are having to actually step back and think about what it might look like moving forward. A group of underclass students are going to take the art gallery over from the seniors who started it. Teachers and students are now beginning to collaborate on spaces more deliberately. And the school is becoming our gallery. It is exciting to watch.

And as with many things that have happened over the years, this has evolved out of a fundamental belief that students should do real things that matter and that our job, as the adults, is to support rather than to control. And as has happened in the past, we are reverse engineering some questions to ask ourselves about our public spaces as we move forward.

Nick Manton’s capstone presentation of his photo project.

What is the process by which the community changes our public spaces?

How does this enhance the way we live in our spaces?

Is this a permanent installation that will stay as is? Or will the space change?

If this installation changes or needs care, who cares for it? Who curates it?

How can we use the space as a teaching tool for ourselves? For others?

What would happen if all of us treated our schools as galleries to be co-curated by students and teachers? How might we transform the way we think about learning?